2007 The Transformation Year

2007 was my year – yoga teacher training; advanced training in my career by some of the best of the best in the country; training for and running a marathon.

And it was the year mom’s symptoms began spiraling – repeating a phrase or a sentence a minute or two after she just said it; confusion of day of the week; losing comprehension of more complex conversations; flat affect.

These symptoms did not show themselves all at once. And then she was told she had a mass in her colon and needed surgery to remove it and biopsy the mass. The days leading up to the surgery she became quite confused (stress makes the symptoms worse) – she was not sure if the surgery was inpatient or outpatient, how many days she would be in the hospital, even unsure why she was having the surgery.

The surgery went well, they removed the mass and it was benign. But now we had a worse problem than cancer – what was going on with her brain? There were more questions than answers and it took us two years before my sister was able to get our mom into all those doctor appointments and get a diagnosis.

One of the hardest pieces of all of this was everyone kept saying ‘she’s so young.’ ‘she’s too young for dementia, Alzheimer’s…’ and we wanted to believe that. This couldn’t be dementia, it had to be grief…but we knew it wasn’t.

Yoga, running, Alzheimer’s, Fronto-temporal dementia….kinda cuts through the crap and reminds me of what’s important. She’s softer, not so quick to anger (at least now and hopefully will stay that way) and so am I. She laughs and smiles quicker and much more, and so do I. She lives in the moment, cause that’s all there is…and I’m getting there.

Back to you sis…